Tiger Woods was a prodigy, a master, a virtuoso. He was able to do what others couldn't. He was able to escape the spotlight while always being in the limelight.

Then it all came crashing down.

On the day before Thanksgiving, the National Enquirer ran a story accusing Woods of having extra-marital affairs. That was followed by an ambulance taking an unconscious Woods to the hospital at 2 a.m. after wrecking his Escalade while exiting his gated community.

Next came reports of a golf club-wielding wife, voicemails from Woods to other women, and a bevy of purported mistresses running to tell their stories. Woods, the most popular athlete in the world, had previously been able to craft his image as he pleased. Then, suddenly, he was having his personal "transgressions," as he called them, aired out before the world.

This sequence of events was unheard of 50 years ago. Not because transgressions didn't occur then - there have been philanderers throughout the history of mankind - but because coverage of this type did not occur in reputable publications.

There has never been a federal statute assuring the right to privacy in this country. It was not needed in the 18th century when the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written because of how rural our nation was, but, even as our country progressed into an urban setting, the right to privacy has never been deemed a necessary element by the federal government.

For the majority of our country's first two centuries the media afforded celebrities - including sports figures, entertainers, politicians, and writers - the same civility that they would a common citizen when it came to their private lives. In fact, the media often protected celebrities by keeping their personal affairs from the public.

For example, famed New York Yankee outfielders Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, the most iconic baseball players of their era, were known by media members who covered the team to be as rambunctious off the field as they were incredible on the field.

While reporters in the press box may have joked or told stories about Ruth's late-night romps, pictures of him carousing with young showgirls or columns filled with questions about his faithfulness never surfaced on the front page.

One infamous story had Ruth being chased by a knife-wielding woman on a train in Shreveport in 1921. Ruth eluded the woman by going off the train and then jumping back on as it departed, leaving her on the platform. According to "The Big Bam," Leigh Montville's biography of Ruth, "Eleven writers, playing cards, watched the whole thing. None of them wrote a word."

Ruth's infidelity allegedly ruined his close friendship with teammate Lou Gehrig and eventually led to Ruth's divorce, but his endeavors were never a top headline. When Ruth collapsed prior to the 1925 season, likely due to an intestinal abscess from heavy drinking and a poor diet, one reporter made up a story that the illness came from eating too many hot dogs.

Mickey Mantle also found it difficult to abstain from New York City's bright lights and glamorous night life. Mantle didn't mind partaking in drinks with the guys, or even without the guys, after a game. As former teammate Jim Bouton revealed in "Ball Four," a behind-the-scenes book about life in Major League Baseball, Mantle would often show up to the ballpark hungover after a night on the town drinking and partying.

Despite instances when he would "push little kids aside when they wanted his autograph" and be "snotty to reporters, just about making them crawl and beg for a minute of his time," Mantle was still a beloved icon to thousands upon thousands because fans judged him solely on his on-the-field performance.

In today's society, an athlete's personal life is often as public as their performance on the field.

In 2008, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo's three-day trip to Mexico with then-girlfiend Jessica Simpson a week before a playoff game led many to question his dedication to football.

Photos of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and other Yankee players enjoying drinks in a bar were not prevalent in the New York papers during those players' careers, but pictures of Alex Rodriguez, the newest Yankees star, at night clubs or bars have found their way into New York publications repeatedly over the last three years.

Pictures that were unheard of as late as the 1950s and 1960s are now common.

Sports figures' personal lives used to be considered private. There was no need for the media to cover those events. Even the start of New York's "chipmunk" reporters, believed to have been nicknamed because their approach to interviewing was similar to a chipmunk digging for nuts, in the late 1950s and early 1960s did not dig directly into off-the-field affairs.

"The baseball establishment had been pretty well protected by the writers that covered the teams," Bouton said in an MLB Network interview with Bob Costas. "In those days, writers felt they were extensions of the team's public relations department."

There used to be an unwritten boundary that separated the public from the private. Unless a player's personal business was significantly affecting his on-field performance, it was rare for transgressions to be brought forth by the media; even for such iconic figures as Mantle, Willie Mays and Joe Namath.

But that was before the 1970 publication of Bouton's "Ball Four," which indirectly helped start a media revolution.

Veteran sportswriter Glen Miller, who has been reporting for 34 years, said he remembers buying the book in high school and taking it home. He read half the book in one sitting.

"I had never read anything like it before," Miller said. "It was entertaining and funny, and what many older people at the time didn't get was that Jim Bouton truly loved the game."

While it wasn't about players' personal lives, the book, co-authored by one of the original "chipmunks," Leonard Schecter, caused controversy because it showed what baseball players did outside of just fielding, hitting, and throwing.

Bouton was shunned from many baseball circles for several years. That group included a number of his former teammates.

Jeff Neuman, who edited "Ball Four," told ESPN.com in 1999, "It created a very different appetite among fans for inside stories, and especially for dirt."

"In a sense, 'Ball Four' prepared [readers] for the next level -- the personal stories, the tabloid stories," Bouton said in a phone interview last month. "But the pendulum has swung too far. I don't like the idea of the hidden cameras and following guys in and out of hotels and bars. It's like Big Brother, but instead of the government snooping on you ... it's almost worse ... the media is snooping on you." Bouton believes the incident that had an even greater effect on the media transition occurred in 1975 when players won their free agency.

"Free agency elevated ball players to the level of major celebrities, and made them tabloid story," Bouton said. As famed sportswriter Frank Deford said in December on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, "There is nowhere near the prurient interest in athletes as there is in show business folk -- until [athletes] cross over from the green grass into the realm of the red carpet."

"The gossipteers didn't give a hoot about Alex Rodriguez when he was simply winning MVP awards or was knee-deep in a steroid scandal," continued Deford, "but as soon as he started merely going out with an actress, he advanced into a different league altogether. See also Beckham, David; and Brady, Tom."

The crossover to celebrity also helped create a divide between the media and athletes. Players formerly trusted sportswriters. Why wouldn't they? The general attitude toward ball players was heroic coverage of idols, not attempts to scoop the latest piece of personal information.

There were often friendships between players and writers because they were often on the same level. Before the advent of free agency players were terribly underpaid - with a few, rare exceptions. Members of the media were generally sympathetic toward the players. They knew how underpaid the players were in comparison to the owners.

As ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap wrote in an essay in 2002, "It was difficult to criticize a struggling athlete when you knew he was not being justly compensated in the first place."

But free agency created a financial divide between the two groups. Players and media members were no longer in the same economic bracket. Now they rarely spend time with one another away from the field or arena because, as Schapp said, "the reporters, literally, cannot afford to frequent the same establishments."

There are other divides between media and players, including race and ethnicity.

Whereas the majority of sportswriters are still white males, the majority of the athletes they cover are not white males. Of the 92 players on the rosters of the championship-winning Pittsburgh Steelers, Los Angeles Lakers, and New York Yankees last season, only 30 - less than one-third - of them were white Americans.

There has also been a bigger, over-arching change.

"Part of the shift isn't so much that the media has changed, but the culture has changed," Miller said. "Look at what is in, say, movies now and compare that to what was in movies in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. There used to be a wider cultural expectation."

"There's a general coarseness in our lives now," Bouton said. "A sort of ugliness where everyone is looking for scandal. People like to hear about famous people's problems to make their own problems seem smaller."

"Back then, we were a much more prim and proper society. It's more of a reflection of how society has changed rather than the media," said Miller. "Now there is a relentless, constant craving for news 24 hours a day."

So the media abides. But what about the public? What do the people constantly crave?

Jim Bouton believes they crave dirt about celebrities.

"Ask somebody if they'd rather read an in-depth story about the health care, which is going to affect the rest of their lives, or would they rather read a story about celebrity dirt," Bouton said. "They'd say 'Forget the health care, give me the dirt.' We have a lot of stupid people that care about the wrong things, and until we get that straightened out, we are going to continue to head in the wrong direction."

But which side brought about this change in coverage? Was it the media, feeding society with paparazzi-style information? Or was it society, with their craving for personal tidbits and juicy rumors?

While Bouton cynically says it was a race to the bottom, Miller thinks it is the craving of society. He referenced the web site for his newspaper and the traffic it receives for a photo gallery of "scantily clad girls playing volleyball on the beach" compared to "a story about a county commissioner saving some oak trees."

With more people interested in scandal and dirt, is it possible for any athlete to live a truly private life?

Tiger Woods seemed to be doing so, but as Deford said, "It's absolutely confounding, in this day and age, that he, a celebrity of his magnitude, could have been so brazen to think that he was insulated from the tabloid press."

Now that the dirt on Woods has been unearthed, one can't help but wonder: if the most popular sports figure in the world cannot escape the wrath of the investigative, paparazzi-style, Big Brother media, can anyone?